The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking Free PDF

The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking [Kindle Edition]

Author: Olivia Laing | Language: English | ISBN: B00DA7HIKK | Format: PDF, EPUB

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The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking Free PDF
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WHY IS IT THAT SOME OF THE GREATEST WORKS OF LITERATURE HAVE BEEN PRODUCED BY WRITERS IN THE GRIP OF ALCOHOLISM, AN ADDICTION THAT COST THEM PERSONAL HAPPINESS AND CAUSED HARM TO THOSE WHO LOVED THEM?

In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six extraordinary men: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver.

All six of these writers were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast. Often, they did their drinking together: Hemingway and Fitzgerald ricocheting through the cafés of Paris in the 1920s; Carver and Cheever speeding to the liquor store in Iowa in the icy winter of 1973.

Olivia Laing grew up in an alcoholic family herself. One spring, wanting to make sense of this ferocious, entangling disease, she took a journey across America that plunged her into the heart of these overlapping lives. As she travels from Cheever’s New York to Williams’s New Orleans, and from Hemingway’s Key West to Carver’s Port Angeles, she pieces together a topographical map of alcoholism, from the horrors of addiction to the miraculous possibilities of recovery.

Beautiful, captivating, and original, The Trip to Echo Spring strips away the myth of the alcoholic writer to reveal the terrible price creativity can exert.

Books with free ebook downloads available The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking [Kindle Edition] Free PDF

• File Size: 1790 KB
• Print Length: 353 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1250039568
• Publisher: Picador (December 31, 2013)
• Sold by: Macmillan
  
• Language: English
• ASIN: B00DA7HIKK
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray:
  Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #36,236 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #12
    in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Creativity & Genius
  • #51
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  • #75
    in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Authors
• #12
  in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Creativity & Genius
• #51
  in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Psychology & Counseling > Creativity & Genius
• #75
  in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Biographies & Memoirs > Arts & Literature > Authors

Many critics and biographers have speculated, pontificated or poked fun at the symbiosis between writers and the bottle, but Olivia Laing delves into their psyches in a quest to truly understand. This book can't help but move you.

Focusing on six well-known American alcoholic writers, Laing, a British author and literary critic, set out on a trip around the USA to visit the places these men inhabited, read through their letters and journals, and speak to surviving relatives, while poring through their published works, trawling for clues, aching for answers. Two committed suicide; two knowingly drank themselves to death. Laing strips the romance and the condemnation from their life stories and paints a picture of six deeply troubled artists.

The book is mostly biography, part journalism about the physiology and psychology of alcoholism, part literary criticism, tied together with interludes of travelogue and memoir, the latter to reveal the author’s personal motivations behind the project. Much emphasis is placed on setting—searching for meaning in the way the authors’ favorite haunts affected both their writing and their personalities—and some of Laing’s strongest writing is in her descriptions of place, in which the language soars.

Why Writers Drink. Does Laing find the answer? I think she does so in the cases of these six writers, though whether that can be extrapolated to all writers and their addictions remains to be seen. Though she demolishes the romanticism associated with artists and alcohol, and provokes deep, thought-provoking questions. Would there have been a “Great Gatsby” or “A Streetcar Named Desire” had their authors not been addicted to drink?

“The Trip to Echo Spring” written by Olivia Laing is a book that talks about the unusual connection between something we usually consider as human weakness, and on the other hand something that is timeless and gives inspiration.

It’s well known that many writers and artists in general liked drinking, and that many of them deeply steeped in alcoholism – to answer the question of why is this so is not easy, whether it comes to the release of inspiration that alcohol offers, running away from reality in the form of bottle or just to be an artist is not easy and you need something to help you bear the pain.

In her book “The Trip to Echo Spring”, Olivia Laing made extensive research about the work and lives of six extraordinary artists, writers whose lives have been marked by alcohol which due to it or despite it, created many literary masterpieces - John Cheever, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Raymond Carver and John Berryman.

The author, who is from UK, set herself the task to go to places where they lived and worked, she talked to people who knew them, read their personal their personal belongings – journals and letters, unraveling the mystery and connection of their creativity and their weaknesses.
The sad truth is that two of six of them were killed by alcohol, while two of them made a suicide, forever hiding the secret of whether alcohol was a consequence or cause of their misery.

In her book, like in cocktail, she mixed lot of things – except presenting some biographical elements about the authors that are unknown to the wider public, she critically talks about the psychology of alcoholics and how alcohol affects the man and his abilities.

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